Curiously, I was just recently talking about Desura with a 12 year old Russian kid who read my game design book, and was thinking of uploading his 3D game project there. "It's a Steam-like game portal where you can buy game digitally," he told me solemnly. And yeah, the game development tools look pretty good. So this is Linden Lab's third PC-based UGC platform (after Second Life and Patterns), and follows on the heels of other recent Linden product launches/acquisitions: Blocksworld, Creatorverse, and Versu (for iOS), and Dio (for the web). With so many new products and purchases, one of them is bound to stick. Right?

Say what you want about Linden Lab, but one of their few undeniable achievements is creating and maintaining trusted user-to-user economies. Second Life is one of few entities in the last few years I deal with on the regular that hasn't had to send out mass emails saying reset password, cancel credit cards, we're sorry for days of downtime, etc. etc.

Linden Lab is a great company to host user-to-user anything that involves money and 99.9% uptime.

I love this move much more than Patterns and all that other stuff. Occasionally Linden Lab falls off the wagon by trying to be a creator instead of doing what they do best, enable creators. They need to leave things like Patterns and Linden Realms alone and instead focus on Second Life and now Desura.